This is a topic on which I am uniquely qualified to speak, since I have taught at three different universities in two different fields, and have spent more years sitting in classrooms as a student than any sane person would ever submit themselves to…..Seriously, there are murderers who’ve served less time in jail than I have spent in classrooms and no parole is yet in sight for me.
And yes, I have occasionally been guilty of many of these inexcusable teaching transgressions, myself. Perhaps my becoming a student post-retirement is my penance.
Seriously, about 10% of college professors seem to do this on a regular basis and there is absolutely no reason for it. Unless you are teaching in the College of Education, all of the students know how to read and can probably do it faster than you can read it out loud to them. You could just mail the damn presentation to the students for them to read and then use the class time for discussion.
Personally, I’ve always thought that PowerPoint was useful for maps, photos, and lists and in between showing those, you should turn the projector temporarily off. Here’s an experiment you can try the next time you are in the classroom: Don’t turn on the computer, just switch on the projector so if shines an empty white screen to the class. The students will quit talking, then turn and face the screen, ready to pay homage to their digital masters and receive content. They have decades of experience of mindlessly watching screens and so, by turning on that projector, you’ve switched on their brains in standby mode.
It is amazing how fast projectors and computerized content have taken over the classroom in the last couple of decades. Maybe it is time to rethink the whole proposition and ask whether PowerPoint really has improved education. Henry James said that a school was a log with a teacher on one end and a student on the other, but nowhere does James mention that a wheelbarrow full of electronics will turn a poor lecturer into the bionic teacher.
Another way for a professor to turn off a class is by requiring an expensive textbook that is not really necessary for the student to take the course. For example, I recently took a course for which it cost $75 to rent a textbook that was so poorly written that even the professor who required it confessed that the book was horrible.
While we are on the subject of textbooks, if you assign more reading than the students can reasonably do, they give up and won’t read any of the assignment. This is a mistake normally done by new professors, each of whom earnestly believes they can raise the standard of education in the nation by assigning more work than the students will have time to complete. Then, in the next class period, the students learn that the professor has also assigned more readings than can be covered during the class. By that point, the students generally just ignore the reading assignments.
Students pay a fortune in tuition and, even in a state university, the total amount of tuition paid by a classroom full of students is well over a thousand dollars a day. Students don’t mind if you cancel a single class, but if you cancel more than a few so you can attend a conference…. Why don’t you write a check and reimburse the students? I have yet to see a syllabus in which the professor fails to mention that attendance is important. If it’s important for the students to attend, it should be important for the professor to be there, too. At the very least, you should arrange for a guest speaker if you are going to be absent.
Speaking of attendance, since the students have paid for the course, don’t waste their class time by taking attendance. Instead, work harder to make a class so interesting that none of the students want to miss it.
If you give an assignment or hold an exam, students expect their work to be graded and returned within a week. Well, to be honest, they want it back quicker than that, but they will wait a week. Don’t give more work than you can grade within a reasonable time and never give a test over the material on homework until after you have graded the homework and returned it.
Most universities now use some form of educational software to deliver course material—systems like Blackboard, Canvas, or Moodle. If you are going to use this software (and I can think of some valid reasons why you might not want to), then learn to use it correctly. About a third of the courses I have taken in recent years had menus with links that didn’t work, grading formulas that reported mathematical nonsense, or deadlines that showed work was due in five years.
My last advice for professors desiring to improve their teaching is to look at the resources your university offers. Every university has some form of in-house academy that offers courses to faculty on how to teach effectively, how to plan lectures, and how to use that learning software. The courses are free, are offered frequently, and should absolutely be avoided at all costs. They are, invariably, taught by crazy women who can’t teach, who have never taught well, and if you give them half a chance, will tell you all about how being cheerleaders in high school was the high point in their lives. Any professor who has taken two or more of those courses is ruined forever and is beyond redemption.
On the other hand, every university has a handful of great lecturers—people who can connect with their students and motivate them to learn. Those people are never promoted into those jobs at the teaching academies but will usually offer you advice if you ask for it. You can also learn a lot about teaching—as well as about the lecture material—just by sitting in on their classes.
Mentoring should be required, enlisting the best teachers to bring along new teachers. I kind of felt like we got dumped solo into our first teaching assignment. I can't think of a profession that could be better served with an apprenticeship program, so long as actually good teachers are selected to act as mentors.
ReplyDeleteWhen you're training young minds, the character of the teacher is as important as the training they get. A well-trained mind and a well-trained heart give you a well-trained teacher. At Harvard, the teacher of the year award, which is voted by the students, virtually guarantees a professor will never make tenure. Academia is a weird world indeed.
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